Christopher Le Brun: Swan Ritual

NEW YORK, NY | albertz benda is delighted to announce Christopher Le Brun: Swan Ritual, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, opening May 4. Drawing its title from A.R. Ammons’ eponymous poem, Swan Ritual represents a distillation of Le Brun’s artistic strategies over the past two decades. This new body of work, comprised of 15 oil paintings and 2 works on paper, reveals his longstanding aim of bringing together color, gesture, space and form to create a fresh visual world both compelling and poetic. These exhilarating new paintings represent the further development of a visual language commenced with the artist’s resumption of abstract painting in the early 2010s. New Paintings, Le Brun’s New York solo exhibition in 2014, began a chapter in the artist’s oeuvre which has become the most sustained period of abstract work to date. His methodology of continuous return to canvases and overpainting remains a constant.   

In The Swan Ritual, Ammons considers how poetry is an invitation for both the writer and the reader to engage in complications that are resolved somewhere within the meaning and cadence of the text. The poet explains, “Something has to be invented before you can work your way out of it, and that’s what happens at the very center of a poem.” This sentiment resounds throughout Le Brun’s work, in which the act of painting becomes a series of questionings, hints, and intuitions in search of solutions to the unique complications posed by each canvas within the studio. 

"The way a poem is built up through lines and images resembles layers of thought. Painting has its layers too - except these are real and physical - so I use my hand and sense of touch in continuous reworking to help me see and think. I need these layers made over time to make something that will absorb endless looking but that will defy easy meaning.”

Complex multi-paneled works such as Winter Quarters bring together several painting strategies, based on their modular compositional structure, while smaller pieces such as Little Jazz or Sheaf of Light turn a single motif or way of thinking into an independent work. In the context of the large ambition of Le Brun’s recent work, they represent parts of a broader language much like the way a single sentence, despite standing alone, can nevertheless have a lasting and powerful resonance.